NaviPlan is a privacy-first, local-only portfolio tracker and goal planner developed by Naviran Technologies in association with freefincal. We have covered its multi-asset tracking and goal-based investing features before. The tool has now released version 1.6.0 “Seamount”, and the headline addition is a significant one: a dedicated Tax Center. This is a major update for…

When we buy a property, it is natural to assume that the registered sale deed establishes that the seller is the owner and that we have now become the owner. But that is not quite how the Indian system works. India largely follows what is described as a presumptive title system through registration. More simply,…

A few years ago, I stopped seriously looking at buying a bigger house. Not because I couldn’t afford one. Not because I had carefully analysed my own situation and concluded that staying in the current apartment was the better choice.  The truth is far less sophisticated. I stopped because almost every smart person on the…

In my previous article, I asked a very basic question: what exactly is money? This time, I want to ask another apparently simple question: what exactly is saving, and why do we do it? To understand saving, we may have to go much further back than banks, salaries and bank balances. Long before human beings…

Another hidden risk in buying property is something many buyers may never consider. You may carefully examine the title deed, obtain an Encumbrance Certificate (EC), check the revenue records and verify the previous sale deeds, and still miss an arrangement that has created rights in the property outside the usual chain of registered property transactions….

A very common assumption among property buyers is that obtaining an Encumbrance Certificate, or EC, is enough to establish that a property is free from encumbrances. But an EC does not certify that the property has a perfectly clear title. It is essentially the result of a search of the transactions and instruments recorded in…

I feel almost a little silly asking such a basic question on a forum like this. It sounds too simple, perhaps even embarrassingly obvious. Yet I have often felt that, despite being educated and earning well, many of us have surprisingly little understanding of what money actually is. Money is often treated either as a…

A reader who sent us the following details wants to know if investing Rs. 75K a month (increasing 10% a year) will fetch him Rs. 10 Crores after 15-20 years with a 12% return expectation. He also wants to know how to allocate this money. Age:32 Profession: Consultant Emergency fund – building Term insurance –…

In June, we launched NaviPlan: a privacy-focused multi-asset tracker and Goal Planner. Developed by Gokul of Naviran Technologies in association with freefincal, this tool lets users track mutual funds, stocks, FDs, global assets, NPS, pension funds, and insurance policies! The user can tag these to financial goals and track their progress. The tool also offers…

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself asking AI more and more financial questions. Sometimes I already knew the answer. Other times I simply wanted to see how it reasoned. Can it calculate a retirement corpus? Compare the old and new tax regimes? Explain sequence of returns risk? Build an asset allocation? Review an…

The quiet financial dependence hiding inside India’s dual-income households.  Every weekend, another Financial Independence story appears on YouTube. Someone retired at forty-five. Another left corporate life to move back to their hometown. Another now spends their mornings trekking or gardening in the mountains instead of attending project meetings on mute. Yes, some of these stories…

Use this simple spreadsheet to review and audit your goal-based investment portfolios. Over the years, we recognised the need for a tool beyond financial planning and portfolio value/return tracking. A financial planning calculator tells you the target corpus for a goal and the investment amount required. A portfolio tracker only tells you the current corpus…

I was recently asked the titular question at an event. The person has a target asset allocation of 20% international equity, 40% Indian equity, and 40% fixed income (the international equity allocation is 33.3% of the overall equity allocation). He wants to know how to rebalance and manage this portfolio in future. First of all,…

In Part 1, I wrote about the assumption embedded in almost every retirement plan: that the person managing the corpus at seventy-five will think and decide the way the person who built it did at forty-five. The research suggests that is not a safe assumption. And yet almost no retirement planning framework addresses it directly….

“How Much Should You Save Monthly Based on Your Age and Income?” I was asked this question in an interview—a discussion. We shall save and invest together here. I think the short but unpleasant answer is:  as much as possible! This does not mean you resign yourself to saying, “I can only invest this much…